Archive for Wine Card

…Provided you know what agave nectar is, where you can find Jameson’s Irish whisky.

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THE I.V. RECIPE

By David Wondrich

Place 2 teaspoons light agave nectar in a cocktail shaker. Add 1 teaspoon hot water and stir. Then add:

1 1/2 ounces Jameson’s Irish whiskey

3/4 ounce fresh-squeezed blood-orange juice

1/2 ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Fill shaker with ice, shake vigorously (thus burning ten calories), and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Top off with ¾ oz red wine, carefully poured over the back of a spoon to create a layered effect.

Advertising pop-ups are the curse of the web. And there’s probably nothing more painful than waiting for a commercial to run its course before you are allowed into a gated site. Still, there are some classy ads out there. Check out this personality test on Maker’s Mark bourbon.

As a non-smoker who believes that the ostracism of smokers has gone a little too far, I just loved these paragraphs by Dave Eggers in Esquire’s Book of Great Writing.

When “Woody” Wilner [the lawyer who sued and won against the tobacco companies] says in conversation and in court that smokers are “weak”, he is of course right, but he also couldn’t be more wrong. Smokers are the most stalwart and persevering people there are. Who but someone with a will of iron could bear such pressure—the sneers of strangers, the glares of his sons and daughters, the bitter, seething comments of the people who are forced to tolerate him and his aura—such decades-long opprobrium?

Who else would be willing to leave his office twice an hour to stand in the cold or rain to suck smoke from a paper tube? Who else would be willing to forgo going out to dinner, to movies, to any public place where smoking is not permitted, for fear that the urge will strike and not be quenchable?

Who but a giant could look at a dying wife, a pleading family, and a young son who will soon lose his mother and whose fate you hold in your yellowed fingers—will this boy lose one parent or two?—and yet still continue? Who but a man of outrageous fortitude, a will of steel, a mind of golden labyrinths?

A tobacco death requires years of meticulous attention and constant, obsessive care; it is perhaps a marvel of mortal achievement. When you die from smoking, the death is yours.

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Excerpted from “Long Live the Career Smoker” from Esquire’s Big Book of Great Writing, Hearst Books, 2003

These coasters, according to Scary Ideas, were printed using a special invisible red ink, which spreads only when moistened. The Mumbai Traffic Police placed at tables and bar counters in Mumbai’s prominent bars. When a customer places their moist glass of alcohol on it, the red ink starts spreading and the face starts to bleed.”

In its introduction to the “Best Bars in America”, Esquire magazine has an interesting list of the five things no bar should have.

A couple of them many not strictly apply in the Indian context, but the first requirement brings to mind Ranga‘s father, who whenever he saw the home darkly lit would apparently lit, would say “Yenidu, Karishma setting?” the reference being to Karishma restaurant, the original watering hole in the LIC office building in Mysore.

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By CHUCK KOLSTERMAN

1) Natural light: Bars are supposed to be womblike sanctuaries, separate from the blinding bleakness of mainstream society. They should always be poorly lit, and they should not have windows. If I’m drinking at 3 pm, the sun should not remind me what time it is.

2) Patrons who are reading: Darkness also discourages all the bozos who think people will be impressed if they’re seen reading in a bar, which is as cool as being drunk at Barnes & Noble.

3) Loud music: There is a belief among many bar owners that loud music creates intimacy (which theoretically increases the possibility of romantic interplay, thereby prompting people to return) by forcing patrons to sit closer and scream directly into one another’s ears. Everybody hates this. I have never been in a bar where people complained about the music being soft.

4.) Dogs: Never bring your dog into a bar. Ever. They’re not clean, and they make the place feel like a veterinarian’s office. How is it that you can’t have a lit cigarette in any bar in New York or LA but you can have a pit bull? I understand that cigarettes cause cancer; they do not, however, rip the faces of small children.

5.) Twenty-two-year-old female bartenders who “just wanna party”: I already have enough problems. That’s why I came to the bar.

Eleven premium brands of Russian vodka. And one man—Brett Forest—to taste and grade them all in one night. Only one of them got an A+

“Firewater is what vodka has always been, devoid of the oaken lineage of its darker cousins—and the high-nosed finery that can too easily get in the way of a good drunk. One does not inhale vodka’s bouquet, but one may use vodka to sterilize a wound on the knee, as familiar a sight to the serious vodka drinker as the shot glass and the handful of ibuprofen.”